Episode 9 of Season 4 of the OC Show took place last week at its regular Friday night slot and the big news is that HWBOT world No.1 Dancop from Germany was available to take part. The show kicked off (with Part 1) with a pretty comprehensive roundup of the contests happening on OC-ESPORTS from show Toolius. He gives a pretty good overview of the Challenger Divisions and the overclockers who are taking part in each Division. Japan’s Ikki is certainly making his presence felt, currently leading in Divisions I, II and III. In the Pro OC Division we find Gunslinger from the US at the top of the table with 479.7 points, a fair way ahead of fellow American jpmboy with 414 points. There’s also a look at the HWBOT Team Cup were Overclock.net are in the lead, and the Alza Cup 2017 where we find Rauf from Sweden in pretty awesome form at the top of the table.

In part II of the show, we find Dancop, Buildzoid and the guys sharing their views on the newly launched Vega series Graphics cards from AMD. The lack of AMD Vega cards in the channel is a topic of discussion, as is the use of HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory), a likely cause of production issues. There is also news from Jon Peddie Research that overall GPU shipments have increased by 7.2% from the previous quarter, largely due to digital currency mining. The guys dig in the topic of mining and how it has affected pricing and availability of cards in the market generally.

The topic of Intel’s forthcoming Coffee Lake platform which apparently will be based on the same Kaby Lake architecture and essentially the same 14nm manufacturing process. The upshot is that Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake will all be considered Intel’s 8th generation, a change to the usual cadence that we’ve come to expect from Intel. Dancop points out that we will probably see the Core-X series taking a similarly confusing launch and release structure.

The latter part of the deals with the news that HWBOT Prime and x265 benchmarks have been temporarily disabled due to a Java-based exploit that has been discovered. The upshot is that certain HWBOT members have been temporarily banned. I think it’s fair to say that the issue has created plenty of drama within the overclocking community. Dancop reveals his thoughts on the topic and mentions how much effort goes into finding and implementing tweaks that improve scores and the fact that he has lost points that actually took a lot of hard work to figure out. Finally, Dancop shows us how he is using a very unique feature on the ROG Rampage VI Apex motherboard that involves soldering a pin to the back of the CPU socket - essentially volt-modding a CPU.